K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Goodbye, Flash

It’s gone. Goodbye. I’ve uninstalled it and I won’t use it any longer. I’m off it.

It’s mainly because of this post on the KDE developers blog. It’s very interesting reading — mostly because I had noticed a few forum posts (on Arch and Ubuntu) about Flash not working but didn’t pay much attention. I’ve been around long enough to remember the old days when there was no current Flash version, so a few scrapes with it weren’t noteworthy.

Then I realized I was still playing the decade-old browser lock-in game, only this time with Flash. Adobe wants to put its weight behind Mozilla, and I’d unwittingly joined it. Everything was just fine in my Gecko-driven little world. And if things are okay for me, I’m less likely to bother with helping someone else.

But after reading the KDE version of the story, I tried it myself — just to be sure I wasn’t showing up late for the party again. I installed KDEmod, and added the Flash plugin on top.

It didn’t work — neither YouTube nor the internal flash statistics on WordPress.com will run. They worked just fine with Kazehakase (of course), and I hadn’t changed any other variables. But it was true. It didn’t seem to work.

Well, that’s very noble of you K.Mandla, you say. Thanks for jumping into the fracas two weeks late, waving a banner around and strutting off the field to go play with Kazehakase some more.

Yeah, I know. I’m a Johnny-come-lately. And I know my opinion, as someone who does not usually use Konqueror or KDE, isn’t worth much.

But I did install Gnash after I yanked Adobe’s version from my system, and quite surprisingly, it works fine on YouTube (the WordPress.com stats don’t quite work, but that’s no great loss). I get proper sound and everything. The controls are a little mashed, but I can still work them. And performance is acceptable.

So I see no reason to use Flash any more. I understand if there’s something most excellently wonderful that only runs under Flash and you just have to use it. That’s always my disclaimer when it comes to FOSS alternatives — if you can’t live without the proprietary software … then don’t.

But I’m okay without it, and really, better for it I think. Maybe my lowly experiences will somehow contribute to a little more weight behind Gnash, and make it a tiny bit bigger. One more drop in the bucket, I guess.

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5 thoughts on “Goodbye, Flash”

Event though Flash works in Firefox, I find my 1.something gigahertz system chewing up all kinds of processing power when I load a page with lots of flash movies.

There is however a handy little plugin called flashblock. It takes a pessimistic approach and blocks all flash content and puts a placeholder where the movie is. You can then just play the flash movie you want manually.

Of course this doesn’t solve any security issues, the issue of performance, or compatibility with Konqueror but it makes the whole experience a bit more tolerable imho.

I need to read up on this a bit more. I got flash to work just fine by installing the version from their site. It seems the MD5 Checksums for flash in the repos were reading the sum for the previous version -though I might not be understanding that either: